Clearly alarmed by shifting public perceptions about facial recognition technology and the potential for state and local governments to impose an outright ban on the use of such technology, tech vendors and other businesses offering facial recognition technology solutions are now mobilizing their forces. They are reaching out to U.S. congressional leadership, urging the House and Senate to re-think any initiatives to impose a "blanket moratorium" on the use of facial recognition technology. And, at the same time, they are rushing to the legal defense of big Silicon Valley tech firms such as Facebook, which is facing a major class action lawsuit in the state of Illinois over the wrongful use of biometric facial data. In one highly public move, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote an open letter on facial recognition technology, which was addressed to the top political leaders in both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate. The letter on facial recognition technology urges political leaders to consider all the positive uses of the technology.

Following the wider skills and talent package announced by the UK government earlier this year, we are now pleased to announce the appointment of five new and highly talented Turing AI Fellows. The Office for Artificial Intelligence, The Alan Turing Institute and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) have worked together to successfully attract the Turing AI Fellows, some of the best research talent from around the world. To continue attracting outstanding AI talent, a new call for the Turing AI Acceleration Fellowship is now open. In addition, details of the Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellowships have also been released and this call will open in early November. Together, both calls have received £37.5 million of investment to support a number of fellows over five years.

The U.S. government, long a proponent of advancing technology for military purposes, sees artificial intelligence as key to the next generation of fighting tools. Several recent investments and Pentagon initiatives show that military leaders are concerned about keeping up with – and ahead of – China and Russia, two countries that have made big gains in developing artificial-intelligence systems. AI-powered weapons include target recognition systems, weapons guided by AI, and cyberattack and cyberdefense software that runs without human intervention. The U.S. defense community is coming to understand that AI will significantly transform, if not completely reinvent, the world's military power balance. The concern is more than military.

Roundup Here's our latest summary of AI news beyond what we've already covered. Over 40 festivals pledge to not use facial recognition: A campaign against facial recognition led by the nonprofit Fight for the Future has led to over 40 music festivals publicly committing that they would not use the technology. Evan Greer, deputy director, and Tom Morello, a musician and guitarist for rock band Rage Against the Machine, teamed up to pen an op-ed celebrating the efforts to push back on the smart AI cameras. "Over the last month, artists and fans waged a grassroots war to stop Orwellian surveillance technology from invading live music events," they wrote on Buzzfeed News. Our campaign pushed more than 40 of the world's largest music festivals -- like Coachella, Bonnaroo, and SXSW -- to go on the record and state clearly that they have no plans to use facial recognition technology at their events." Musicians and fans were invited to write to their favorite festival organizers, urging them to not support facial recognition. Now, the list of festivals that have confirmed they won't be using the tech has grown. There are still a few top names that have yet to respond, however, including Burning Man and Outside Lands. You can see the complete list here. Amazon's facial recognition tool fails on black athletes: Amazon's controversial Rekognition software mistook the faces of 27 black athletes competing in American football, baseball, basketball, and hockey, as suspected criminals in a mugshot database. An experiment by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed the dangers of relying on facial recognition technology like Rekognition. "This technology is flawed," said Duron Harmon, a football player for the New England Patriots safety whose face was false identified in the experiment. "If it misidentified me, my teammates, and other professional athletes in an experiment, imagine the real-life impact of false matches.

Up to 630 million people are living on land threatened by flooding from sea level rises by the end of the century – three times as many as previously thought, according to a new analysis. The greatest increase in risk was found for communities living in Asian megacities, due to the way earlier estimates were worked out. It's a completely new perspective on the scale of this threat," says Benjamin Strauss at Climate Central, a New Jersey-based independent organisation. Previous calculations of the number of people at risk have been based on estimates of land elevation around the world using satellite data from NASA. But that approach gets confused by rooftops and forests, which can be mistaken for the ground, meaning a skyscraper-packed city such as Shanghai could look at a misleadingly low risk of flooding as seas rise.

Tempus, a technology company advancing precision medicine through the practical application of artificial intelligence in healthcare, today announced that Dr. Scott Gottlieb, MD, has joined its Board of Directors. Dr. Gottlieb will serve as an advisor to Tempus and its leadership team, leveraging his vast experience as a medical policy expert and public health advocate to support Tempus as it harnesses the power and promise of big data and artificial intelligence to personalize patient care. Dr. Gottlieb most recently served as the 23rd Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where he focused on developing innovative approaches to improving medical outcomes, reshaping healthcare delivery, and expanding patient choice and safety. Previously, he also served as the agency's Deputy Commissioner for Medical and Scientific Affairs and as a Senior Advisor to the FDA Commissioner. During his time as a Senior Advisor to the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr. Gottlieb worked on the implementation of the Medicare drug benefit, where he supported policy work on quality improvement and the agency's coverage process, particularly as it related to new medical technologies.

The Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a document prepared by the High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG). This independent expert group was set up by the European Commission in June 2018, as part of the AI strategy announced earlier that year. The AI HLEG presented a first draft of the Guidelines in December 2018. Following further deliberations by the group in light of discussions on the European AI Alliance, a stakeholder consultation and meetings with representatives from Member States, the Guidelines were revised and published in April 2019. In parallel, the AI HLEG also prepared a revised document which elaborates on a definition of Artificial Intelligence used for the purpose of its deliverables.

AI is a growing movement with advances like IBM's Watson and Hanson Robotic's Sophia, and these supercomputers are starting to have a more human-like intelligence. The future of AI is promising as it will impact big data and cybersecurity by bringing mechanical accuracy together with reasoning, self-correction, and learning through activities. With the implementation of AI in cybersecurity, AI will be able to locate and flag threats. This will help increase the protection of information and data while decreasing response time to threat risks. With an advanced AI program that's able to learn and adapt, AI-based cybersecurity will be able to implement timely plans to block both complex and simple security incidents.

Geoscientists invented a machine learning tool to sift through satellite data. Today's Earth scientists are spending less time standing in fields collecting soil samples, and more time behind a computer screen. Most geoscience data is automatically collected by sensors and satellites. The big challenge is making sense of all that data so that scientists can get back to what they do best: Observing the world, asking questions, conducting experiments, and finding evidence. Scientists use large, publicly available datasets from government programs such as NASA, NOAA, and USGS (that's the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and US Geological Survey, in non-acronym speak). Many Earth scientists also have private sources, and combining these public and private datasets is difficult and time-consuming.

For private companies and government agencies trying to track peoples' movements, technology is making the task increasingly easy. Facial recognition and analysis are becoming increasingly popular surveillance tools -- the technology was rolled out in airports across the world this summer as a tool for verifying flyers' identity, and is widely used by police departments for tracking suspected criminals. Privacy-minded activists and lawmakers are now hitting back at facial recognition. The technology has been banned for law-enforcement purposes across California, and a similar bill is being weighed in Massachusetts. Meanwhile, artists and researchers have begun to develop clothes designed to thwart algorithms that detect human faces. But emerging technology presents alternate means of identifying and tracking humans beyond facial recognition.